Visualize this.
You are standing on the edge of an oil rig. Behind you the entire oil platform is getting engulfed in an unabated fire. You heard the deafening explosion that caused this and now there is hue and cry everywhere. Alarm bells ringing. Panic. More panic. Chaos. You have somehow made it to the edge of the platform.
You need to make a decision. Quickly.
Stay, and get charred to death(all the while hoping for a miracle rescue)
Or
Jump into the sea of burning oil and debris and risk death by hypothermia.
What would you choose? Stay or Jump?
Andy Mochan faced a similar situation in 1988 when a disastrous explosion occurred on the Piper Alpha oil rig in the North Sea which claimed 167 lives. Between getting ablaze and jumping into the sea of uncertainty Andy chose to jump and was later rescued to safety .
When asked why he took that potentially fatal leap, he did not hesitate. He said, “It was either jump or fry.” He chose possible death over certain death.
The Burning platform phrase comes from this real life incident described above. It is a metaphor used in change management field which was first introduced by Daryl Conner in his work Managing at the Speed of Change to convey a sense of urgency to implement changes important for an organizations success.
Burning platforms are very powerful drivers of strategic change. They are what happens when:
There is a real and immediate crisis.
There is a limited number of difficult and challenging choices
Each of the choices is irreversible
Each choice has a high risk of failure
For business to adopt a radical strategy change they need to feel a sense of compelling urgency to execute it. Generating that business imperative is the most important thing. Unfortunately this often involves creating a pain message. A burning platform is a very specific, urgent kind of pain message.
“Orchestrating pain messages throughout the institution is the first step in developing organisational commitment to (major) change.”
The Covid-19 pandemic was a burning platform that accelerated many strategic and technological changes which were imperative for business to survive. Organizations reacted rapidly to the the burning platform with digital transformation, remote working models and even reorganizing supply chains just to survive and mitigate the major disruption caused. Many organizations that chose to maintain the status-quo or simply didn’t jump from the platform perished.
Jumping into the sea of debris and oil is just is still risky and may not always save you. Consider the infamous example of burning platform that was experienced by Nokia in 2011. Other phone manufacturers, including Apple, Google, and Samsung, had begun to chip away at Nokia’s once-dominant market position. Stephen Elop, the company’s CEO, informed all employees in a memo that, in order for the business to continue, it would have to work with Microsoft to transition its products from its own, superior operating system to Windows 8. His defense? The status quo would not be effective. Although partnering with Microsoft wasn’t the best move, it was a good one because, in contrast to the business’s current situation, it gave some promise of success. As we now understand, the move failed. Microsoft shut Nokia down.
However, there are companies that have driven continuous innovation and thrived in a rapidly advancing world by jumping from one burning platform to the other. Take the example of Nintendo, the company which revolutionized mobile gaming with the launch of Pokémon Go in 2016. The video game company started with the traditional Japanese playing cards called Hanafuda, and since then it has always found way to use new technology to advance and transform their business and become leaders in the gaming industry. They were even among the first to introduce gaming consoles, mobile gaming devices and even the first cloud gaming console Nintendo Switch. The bottom line is they never sat idle on their past successes or maintained status-quo. Nintendo kept jumping from one burning platform to another consistently maintaining and even expanding its market share and its customer base along the way.
It is for the organizations to select the change they want to advocate for and the framework of the change management accepting the fact that more often people frequently change only in response to a crisis with potential negative repercussions…
What “burning platform” does your organization have that needs urgent attention?
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